Lenovo Services running on newish Asus laptop ?

[MOoD90s 0]

[FONT=Tahoma, sans-serif]Setting up an Asus TUF Gaming A16 FA608UM, I was surprised to see in the Process Explorer a couple of active service processes from a competitor, Lenovo.
The parent of this Service is C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\lenovofnandfunctionkeys.inf_amd64_{a whole bunch of random characters}\LenovoUtilityService.exe
The description of this service is: Lenovo Fn and function keys service.
Then there are two child processes: FnHotKeyCapsLKNumLK.exe, the full path of which is Access Denied, and another child process: C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\lenovofnandfunctionkeys.inf_amd64_{a whole bunch of random characters}\FnHotkeyUtility.exe
the description of which is: This utility controls special keyboard functions and like hotkeys and function keys, on your Lenovo notebook.
This seems quite reasonable, except it is not a Lenovo notebook!
The function keys are working on the laptop.
I disabled the service, and the function keys continue to work.

Looking further, it turns out that there are 4 Lenovo services running on this Asus laptop.
The other 3 are:
Lenovo Intelligent Sensing Service – SmartSense.exe also located under DriverStore\Filerepository\
Universal Device Client Service – C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\Lenovo\udc\Service\UDClientService.exe
System Interface Foundation Service – C:\WINDOWS\Lenovo\ImController\Service\Lenovo.Modern.ImController.exe

I disabled them all and rebooted. The boot was a bit slow. Possibly because it was trying to start services that were disabled?
So I switched them to Manual, to see if any of them would be started. The SystemInterfaceFoundationService was started, the other 3 were not. Then the SystemInterfaceFoundationService changes its own startup type to Automatic (Delayed Start) from Manual.

I ran a virus scan of C:\Windows\System32 and then on the entire system and it found nothing.
I ran a complete scan with a second antivirus scanner and it also found nothing suspicious.

I ran Dism /Online /Cleanup-image /ScanHealth and it found nothing to report.
I ran Dism /Online /Cleanup-image /CheckHealth and it found nothing out of order.
I ran sfc /scannow and it found nothing to fix.

I have downloaded and installed the latest drivers from ASUS TUF Gaming A16 (2025)

I have only installed a few application programs so far, mostly open source. I queried perplexity and none of those programs install any Lenovo services.

So what’s up – is Asus shipping Lenovo software or did malware somehow creep in? [/FONT]